_The Law of Final Productivity Applicable to the Labor of Society._--The law of final productivity applies to every mill, shop, or mine separately considered. If its capital remains fixed in amount, units of labor produce less and less as they become more numerous. The product of any unit at any one time may be measured by taking it away and seeing how much the output of the establishment is reduced. The law, however, applies to all the mills, shops, mines, etc., considered as a social complex of working establishments. As the working society grows larger without growing richer in the aggregate, the power of labor to produce goods of all kinds grows less. At any one time this producing power is measured by taking away from every working establishment a number of its operatives and ascertaining how much less is produced after the withdrawal. Such a test on the social scale is never made consciously. Each employer can test in an approximate way the effect of reducing his own force, and the effect of gradually enlarging it, and there are influences at work which result in enlarging one industry when others are enlarged and in causing the final productivity of labor to be uniform in all. A shoe manufacturer can tell, in a general way, how much an extra man or two will be worth to him. It is possible to ascertain by experience about what number of shoes that additional labor will, in a year, add to the output of the shoe factory or the number of tons of steel it will add to the present annual output of a furnace. When these products vary in the case of different shops, the men are called to the points where the apparent additions are largest, and the constant tendency is toward a level of productive power. The building up of an imaginary force from the beginning presents, in a clear and emphatic way, the fact that the specific productivity of labor grows less as, other things remaining the same, workers become more numerous. We should know on _a priori_ grounds that this must be the fact; but we can verify it by observation and statistical inquiry. Where men are numerous and land and tools are scarce, labor is comparatively unproductive; and it is highly productive where land and tools are plentiful. There is no doubt that crowding the world full of people, without providing the world with capital in a proportionate way, would impoverish everybody whose income depends on labor. _The Law of Wages._--Even though labor creates the amount _ABDE_, it is not yet perfectly clear that it will be able to get that amount. For aught we now know the _entrepreneur_ may keep some of it, and for aught we know he may keep some of the quantity _BCD_ which is distinctly the product of capital. Let us see whether he can in reality withhold any part of _ABDE_, which is the product of labor. [Illustration]